---The trouble is that you think you have time------Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe------It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---

When Dharmakirti so delicately said in the 9th Century CE: "The unquestioned authority of the Vedas; belief in a world-creator; the quest for purification through ritual bathings; the arrogant division into castes; the practice of mortification to atone for sin; -- these five are the mark of the crass stupidity of witless men

Uh tilt, isn't this the same Suvarnadvipi Dharmakirti which is 7th Century period [b. c. 600–d. c. 660 CE?] from the Srivijayan Sumatra legacy, who is the teacher of the Nalanda Pandita Atisa?

Bhikkhus, if you develop and make much this one thing, it invariably leads to weariness, cessation, appeasement, realization and extinction. What is it? It is recollecting the Enlightened One. If this single thing is recollected and made much, it invariably leads to weariness, cessation, appeasement, realization and extinction.Anguttara-Nikaya: Ekanipata: Ekadhammapali: PañhamavaggaBuddhanussatiSCVSMVMMBS

When Dharmakirti so delicately said in the 9th Century CE: "The unquestioned authority of the Vedas; belief in a world-creator; the quest for purification through ritual bathings; the arrogant division into castes; the practice of mortification to atone for sin; -- these five are the mark of the crass stupidity of witless men

Uh tilt, isn't this the same Suvarnadvipi Dharmakirti which is 7th Century period [b. c. 600–d. c. 660 CE?] from the Srivijayan Sumatra legacy, who is the teacher of the Nalanda Pandita Atisa?

It would seem so.

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723

>> Do you see a man wise[enlightened/ariya]in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<<-- Proverbs 26:12

The Dalai Lama wrote:(or, said?):"While pointing out the fundamental similarities between worldreligions, I do not advocate one particular religion at the expense of allothers, nor do I seek a new 'world religion.' All the different religionsof the world are needed to enrich human experience and worldcivilization. Our human minds, being of different caliber and disposition,need different approaches to peace and happiness. It is just like food.Certain people find Christianity more appealing, others prefer Buddhismbecause there is no creator in it and everything depends upon your ownactions. We can make similar arguments for other religions as well.Thus, the point is clear: humanity needs all the world's religions to suitthe ways of life, diverse spiritual needs, and inherited national traditionsof individual human beings."

Well, I'm inspired reading of the Dalai Lama's open-mindedness and flexibility here. If more of us were this tolerant, there would be a lot more harmony in spiritual circles / Forums etc.

Then the Blessed One, picking up a tiny bit of dust with the tip of his fingernail, said to the monk, "There isn't even this much form...feeling...perception...fabrications...consciousness that is constant, lasting, eternal, not subject to change, that will stay just as it is as long as eternity." (SN 22.97)

Yes, I like that. It's in accord with Bhikkhu Bodhi's Tolerance and Diversity editorial:

From the Buddhist point of view, to make tolerance contingent upon whitewashing discrepancies would not be to exercise genuine tolerance at all; for such an approach can "tolerate" differences only by diluting them so completely that they no longer make a difference. True tolerance in religion involves the capacity to admit differences as real and fundamental, even as profound and unbridgeable, yet at the same time to respect the rights of those who follow a religion different from one's own (or no religion at all) to continue to do so without resentment, disadvantage or hindrance....To the extent that a religion proposes sound ethical principles and can promote to some degree the development of wholesome qualities such as love, generosity, detachment and compassion, it will merit in this respect the approbation of Buddhists. These principles advocated by outside religious systems will also conduce to rebirth in the realms of bliss — the heavens and the divine abodes. Buddhism by no means claims to have unique access to these realms, but holds that the paths that lead to them have been articulated, with varying degrees of clarity, in many of the great spiritual traditions of humanity. While the Buddhist will disagree with the belief structures of other religions to the extent that they deviate from the Buddha's Dhamma, he will respect them to the extent that they enjoin virtues and standards of conduct that promote spiritual development and the harmonious integration of human beings with each other and with the world.http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... ay_24.html

Shaswata_Panja wrote:Well I told you Buddha in my eyes taught theism (not theism as in a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God)...Theism here covers all sorts of supernatural claims and concepts....like the assertion that there is life after death--this will definitely not qualify as atheism in front of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Denett or Lawrence Krauss

I agree that from an Indian perspective it is misleading to label Buddhism as atheistic. But are we willing to entertain that perspective?

Shaswata_Panja wrote:Well I told you Buddha in my eyes taught theism (not theism as in a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God)...Theism here covers all sorts of supernatural claims and concepts....like the assertion that there is life after death--this will definitely not qualify as atheism in front of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Denett or Lawrence Krauss

I agree that from an Indian perspective it is misleading to label Buddhism as atheistic. But are we willing to entertain that perspective?

Various traditional Hindu apologists/polemists did just that, labeled Buddhism atheistic.

The Sanskrit term Āstika ("pious, orthodox") refers to the systems of thought which admit the validity of the Vedas.[7] Sanskrit asti means "there is", and Āstika (per Pāṇini 4.2.60) derives from the verb, meaning "one who says 'asti'". Technically, in Hindu philosophy the term Āstika refers only to acceptance of authority of Vedas, not belief in the existence of God.[8] However, though not accepted universally, Āstika is sometimes translated as "theist" and Nāstika as "atheist", assuming the rejection of Vedas to be synonymous to the rejection of God.[9] In Indian philosophy, three schools of thought are commonly referred to as nastika for rejecting the doctrine of Vedas: Jainism, Buddhism and Cārvāka. In this usage, nastika refers to the non-belief of Vedas rather than non-belief of God.[7] However, all these schools also rejected a notion of a creationist god and so the word nastika became strongly associated with them.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723

>> Do you see a man wise[enlightened/ariya]in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<<-- Proverbs 26:12

essai wrote:The real question to me is, why do the Buddhists referred to in the OP value the issue so much when Buddha himself emphasized that metaphysical certainty is inconsequential to the path?

Perhaps because of their romantic roots -

Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha's teachings but from the Dharma gate of Western psychology, through which the Buddha's words have been filtered. They draw less from the root sources of the Dharma than from their own hidden roots in Western culture: the thought of the German Romantics./.../Like so many other products of modern life, the root sources of Buddhist Romanticism have for too long remained hidden. This is why we haven't recognized it for what it is or realized the price we pay in mistaking the part for the whole. Barring major changes in American society, Buddhist Romanticism is sure to survive. What's needed is for more windows and doors to throw light onto the radical aspects of the Dharma that Buddhist Romanticism has so far left in the dark.

And secondly possibly because Westerners (geographically and culturally) seem to tend to take an extrovert, externalist view of matters; as if the truth and knowledge somehow exist independently of the (potential) knower, and so all that it takes to know or realize something is to have the right arguments, the right interpersonally-verifiable evidence, and then there will be knowledge or realization of the truth -- and this regardless of the personal virtues and qualities of the (potential) knower.

On the other hand, Dharmic religions seem to emphasize what in Western philosophy is called "virtue epistemology" - ie. how a person needs to be, what personal virtues and qualities a person must have in order to know or realize something.In one sense, Buddhism is an example of an elaborate applied virtue epistemology, as it instructs a person to develop certain personal qualities for the sake of knowing and making an end to suffering.

Shaswata_Panja wrote:Western Buddhism and consensus Buddhism is the Buddhism that has been forged by Western Converts who want to overlook the supernatural or paranormal claims of the Buddha (that is all claims that donot conform with scientfic materialism) and basically cut out the core aspects of Buddhism that have to do with rebirth and kamma and other realms and other worlds..Western Buddhism also has a decidedly anti-ritual, anti-celibacy,anti-renunciation and anti-monasticism slant to it...the biggest teachers of Western Buddhism are decidedly non-monk such as Jack Kornfield,Joseph Goldstein,Gil Fronsdal

Agreed.

and can Western Buddhism survive by cutting such things out of the Buddhadhamma

I suppose Western Buddhism can survive even by cutting out such things; but whether it can then still serve as a raft to liberation from suffering is another matter.

Western Buddhism tries to make an assertion that Buddhism is a religion based on atheism when IT IS NOT...Okay It does not have a Creator God..big deal ..But surely acknowledges other realms, rebirth,kamma, superpowers,ghosts,angels and huge plethora of other things of the same supernatural ilk....

Now a religion that incorporates such elements will be NOT be seen as an atheistic religion by the New Atheists or to btter define it--scientific materialists

Shaswata_Panja wrote:Western Buddhism and consensus Buddhism is the Buddhism that has been forged by Western Converts who want to overlook the supernatural or paranormal claims of the Buddha (that is all claims that donot conform with scientfic materialism) and basically cut out the core aspects of Buddhism that have to do with rebirth and kamma and other realms and other worlds..Western Buddhism also has a decidedly anti-ritual, anti-celibacy,anti-renunciation and anti-monasticism slant to it...the biggest teachers of Western Buddhism are decidedly non-monk such as Jack Kornfield,Joseph Goldstein,Gil Fronsdal

Interestingly you pick on poor Jack and Joseph without knowing a damned thing about them, what and how they teach. It is rather shameful to so seriously misrepresent these two teachers so grossly. As for Fronsdal, I cannot say, given that I know little about him.

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723

>> Do you see a man wise[enlightened/ariya]in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<<-- Proverbs 26:12

binocular wrote:In one sense, Buddhism is an example of an elaborate applied virtue epistemology, as it instructs a person to develop certain personal qualities for the sake of knowing and making an end to suffering.

Certainly, and the Buddha certainly did not see a need in what he taught for any sort of god notion in its various guises as being needed or being consistent with truth as he understood it.

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723

>> Do you see a man wise[enlightened/ariya]in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<<-- Proverbs 26:12

culaavuso wrote:I find the distinction between atheism and nontheism to be an important one in meaning, and not just in word choice. As I understand the terms, "nontheism" is a lack of belief in god, while "atheism" is a belief in a lack of god. By this interpretation, "nontheism" is not-all-that-interested in metaphysical debate, while "atheism" is interested and takes a firm position in that debate.

Thank you, yes, agreed.

culaavuso wrote:Is the path of practice based around individual effort for the sake of release from samsara, or is the path of practice based around ritual and appeasing that god for the sake of personal gain in this or a future life?

Those are not the only options, though.Theism isn't just about appeasing God for the sake of personal gain in this or a future life.Some forms of theism are centred around love for God - where a person performs activities out of their love for God. In those forms of theism, worshipping God for the sake of personal gain is seen as a low form of theism. Love for God is emphasized in different theistic religions, so it's not that a particular theistic religion would emphasize love for God, and another wouldn't. Some Christians, Muslims, monotheistic Hindus center on love for God, not on what they can get from God.Of course, love for God isn't something one could just will oneself into, or realize through philosophical argument, or inherit from one's parents or religious community. It's more like something one either has or doesn't have, but it is possible to develop it through a course of cultivation.

binocular wrote:In one sense, Buddhism is an example of an elaborate applied virtue epistemology, as it instructs a person to develop certain personal qualities for the sake of knowing and making an end to suffering.

Certainly, and the Buddha certainly did not see an need in what he taught for any sort of god notion in its various guises as being needed or being consistent with truth as he understood it.

Of course. We'd be really poorly off if we'd have to rely for our salvation on theistic notions.

This is not to say that theistic notions are altogether ineffective in regard to solving the problem of suffering. But I will argue that theism is extremely difficult to enter, and it leaves most people out in the cold. Being born into a theistic family or religion is in no way enough to make one a theist or to find happiness as a theist.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is much more generous, much more open, has many more gates, and pretty much anyone can enter. Perhaps not everyone can become a member of an actual Buddhist group, but probably everyone can take up some practice as advised by the Buddha.

All things considered, I'm glad there is Western Buddhism. Even if it's watered down or has a misleading worldview, the fact that it exposes people to the Dhamma who would otherwise have never heard of it or found an interest in it can only be good. Shallow people will stick with the watered down or misleading stuff but people with more critical minds will cut through the undergrowth and figure out the Dhamma is for themselves.

Shaswata_Panja wrote:and can Western Buddhism survive by cutting such things out of the Buddhadhamma

Possibly what really matters in regard to cutting out those "supernatural" aspects of Buddhism is the intention, the reason for doing so.

One thing is to simply have no interest one way or another in giant fishes, fancy superpowers, ghosts and such. Or even in karma and rebirth.

Something quite different is to dismiss notions of giant fishes, fancy superpowers, ghosts and such, of karma and rebirth as being "unscientific," or "cultural baggage" and the like. For to do so, can involve a lot of clinging to views. And sometimes, one's desire to be happy and not suffer can get squished by those views.

and yes pulga , there is certain reluctance on part of modern Buddhists to understand Buddhism by placing it in the historical,social,cultural,political,economic context in which Buddhism took shape and flourished...divorcing Buddhism from the the crucible that nurtured it and grew will lead to an incomplete understanding of Buddhism

At the risk of repeating myself I have to again delineate the various philosophical schools of Hinduism, so that Buddhists when talking of Hinduism know which part of Hinduism they are talking about (this basically agrees with what titbillings wrote----I would like to introduce the idea that the idea of an absolute Monotheistic God (as Deity like Allah,Yahweh) makes an entry into Hinduism with the rise of the Puranas..especially the Srimad Bhagavatam............but even then the Hindu Monotheistic Deity is NOT a Jealous God....It is Henotheism and not Monotheism)

Samkhya tradition of Hinduism is atheisticPurva Mimasa of Hinduism is atheistic---this is basically what Buddhists call Brahmanism --Vedic Fire rituals Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is theistic--but is problematic since it takes its whole philosophical underpinnings from SamkhyaNyaya in Hinduism is theistic's Vaiseshekha in Hinduism is atheisticVedanta (Advaita Vedanta) is monistic and tends to be largely atheistic as propounded by Gaudapada and Shankaracharya (basing themselves on the 4 Mahavakyas)Vedanta (Vishishta Dvaita Vedanta) is theistic--propounded by Ramanujam--------------Vaishnavism comes from these two philosophiesVedanta (Dvaita Vedanta) is theistic --propounded by Madhavacharya---------------------Vaishnavism comes from these two philosophies

Now common Hinduism as practiced by Billion plus Indians in India derive its philosophical underpinnings from the last two schools...that's why you see huge temples in India after 200--300AD

But all the 9 schools described above pay their respect to the Vedas (be they theistic or atheistic or monistic) and are known as the orthodox schools of Indian religion

Carvaka (scientific materialism on which Buddha comes down hard in MN 60) ,Ajvika and others are unorthodox schools as they donot pay respect to the Vedas

Atheism in Indian Philosophy : From the Rig Veda to Modern Times

by Dr.Koenraad Elst

(In Cork, Ireland, on 20-22 September 2013, the British Friedrich Nietzsche Society organized its regular conference, featuring the book Also Sprach Zarathustra and the relevance of Nietzsche in the Asian philosophies. I was due to read this paper there, was prevented from doing so by other pressing duties, but this is my text in hand-out form. A fully referenced paper with bibliography will appear shortly.)

Friedrich Nietzsche was not familiar with Indian philosophy (much less even with Chinese philosophy), though he was in a position to be fairly well-informed about Indian thought. This was a cornerstone of the Indo-European philology then animating German intellectuals and progressing fast under the hands of the Orientalists. G.W.F. Hegel already wrote a philosophical discussion of the Bhagavad Gītā in 1829. Even earlier, J.W. Goethe and Franz Schubert praised Kālidās’s play Śakuntalā. Arthur Schopenhauer practically built his philosophy on the precedent of the Upaniṣads, the “confidential teachings” of the Veda (“knowledge”) collections of hymns, and on Buddhism. So, through his knowledge of German philosophy, Nietzsche must have been exposed to some conclusions of Indian thought. But for his direct knowledge about it, he learned little from the discipline of Orientalism, then very much flourishing in the German speech community and certainly accessible to a professor of Classical Philology. Instead he relied on the theories of colourful amateurs like Louis Jacolliot. Nietzsche therefore didn’t know, or at any rate didn’t let on, that the godless philosophy which he tried to found, already existed in India. He also didn’t know that, centuries ago, this Indian atheism had ended up largely losing the battle against a revitalized theism. His Christian critics must take heart from this development, showing how history proves that religion is anchored in man’s nature: if you chase it away, it returns with a vengeance. This paper deals with what he missed, and how the Indian atheist schools of thought reflect several typical Nietzschean themes.

A practical matter: since this is a survey covering a lot of ground and addressing a non-Indologist audience, a few background facts have to be explained at the outset. Writing appeared in India ca. 300 BCE, after which a flood of writings come to our attention. It is a common mistake to date the ideas expressed therein to the last centuries BC. Some of them may be far older, but have appeared in writing only when that medium became available. A fact of Indian intellectual life is the towering position of the Veda (“knowledge”), four collections of hymns dating to beyond 1000 BC, and their ancillary literature. According to a now-common opinion, gradually developed as the memory of their composition receded, the Veda-s were divinely revealed at the beginning of time. In reality, the names of their composers are known, elements of their genealogy, historical facts such as battles and celestial configurations, and geographical data such as the names of mountains and rivers. They take the form of man addressing the gods – the reverse of the Ten Commandments or the Quran, where God addresses man. Either way, the Vedas dominate the intellectual landscape. The orally transmitted stories about human and divine history are collected in the Purāna-s (“antiquities”), a very large body of literature written down in the 1st millennium CE or even later. Though lip-service is paid to the Veda’s, the Purāṇa stories have far more influence on the life of the masses, together with the two epics, Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, written down around the time of Christ but their core narratives much older. However, these stories have little relevance for our history of philosophical atheism.

Free death

A lot of Hindus boast that one can call oneself a Hindu and be other things besides, “even” an atheist. Thus, Vināyak Dāmodar Sāvarkar in his epoch-making book Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1923), the manifesto of Hindu nationalism, writes that even an agnostic or an atheist can be a Hindu. And the current internet paper Centre Right India argues: “The Vedas in Hinduism are not absolute, and have been criticized by people who did not subscribe to their view, since time immemorial. This did not make the critics any less Hindu. Indeed, Hinduism is not alien to atheism, or agnostic schools of thought.” (Pulakesh Upadhyaya: “Atheism and Hindutva – Carvaka to Savarkar”, 3 July 2012) However, this view of matters only covers exceptions. The typical modern Hindu, of Nietzsche’s day as well as of our own, will use “atheist” as a swearword. His main religious practice consists in offering worship through a devotional ritual (pūjā) to a “chosen deity” (iṣṭa devatā).

A theme pioneeringly dealt with in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is “free death”, taking one’s own life. Sāvarkar himself was an atheist, he refused religious funeral rites, but in 1966 he chose to die by sallekhānā, i.e. fasting unto death, as is fairly common since time immemorial among Jain and other monks. Nietzsche probably didn’t realize that the “free death” he advocated was common not just among the pre-Christian Romans (advocated by Seneca) but was still alive as an ideal among Hindus, or at least among their religious personnel. Another committer of fasting unto death was Gandhian activist Vinobā Bhāve. On his deathbed in 1982, under popular applause, he received a visit from the Prime Minister Indīrā Gāndhī. But at the same time, secularists in the media were fulminating that he should be imprisoned and force-fed as he was “trespassing against the law of the land”. Strictly speaking this was true, as the British colonizers had enacted a law against suicide and euthanasia in the 19th century, which was still on the statute books. This law was inspired by the purely Christian principle that man is not the master of his own life and death, only God is. But the positive reaction of the people to Bhāve’s self-choice of his death showed the native sensibilities accurately: they were convinced that if certain conditions are met (for this should of course not be done lightly, e.g. out of youthful lovesickness), a free death is acceptable and even the best course of action.

Atheism: heterodox

Meanwhile, “Hindu atheism” is mostly bygone glory. Today’s Hindus use “atheist” as a swearword to designate the enemy or to make the difference between themselves and “godless Buddhism”. Yet, Hinduism has a powerful premodern tradition of atheism. It has been superseded by theist philosophies at least from the 9th century CE, and by 1500 it was not even a memory, as we shall explain.

On the one hand we have a number of schools deemed heterodox, i.e. not in awe of the Veda-s. Buddhism, famous for its doctrine that all is suffering caused by desire, and that the way out of this vale of tears is meditation upto the point of liberation, doesn’t altogether deny the existence of the Vedic gods. These are narratively used in the Buddhist canon to ask the Buddha, who has just reached Liberation, to teach his way to others. The Buddha advised both his monks and lay politicians that a community functions best if its religious traditions are upheld, e.g. its festivals and pilgrimages associated with the Vedic gods. His monks would later take the Vedic gods all the way to Japan and build temples for them there. However, the gods play no role whatsoever in the Buddha’s analysis of the human condition and method of remedy, neither in its moral nor in its meditative aspects. You as an individual have earned your merits and demerits and you yourself have to work them off and earn your liberation; no god or other being can do it in your stead. In 2005 there was a textbook controversy in Thailand, where the Buddhist clergy objected to the mentioning of God in schoolbooks, as this “illusion” had no place in Buddhism and had allegedly been smuggled in by the Christian missionaries.

However, from its early centuries there developed a devotional Buddhism in which prayers are said to the Buddha or a related entity in order to take away your demerits and your sorrows. Indian Buddhism was finished off ca. 1194 by the Islamic invaders, so it could not degenerate all the way, but in East Asia, varieties of the devotional “Pure Land Buddhism” attract the loyalty of most lay Buddhists.

Lokāyata, ”worldliness”, a sceptical yet ascetic sect, is popular among modern Marxists but despised by rivalling contemporaneous philosophers. This school was radically anti-religious and rejected the concepts of supernatural beings, eternal soul, life after death and reincarnation. Makkhali Gośāla, who preached contemporaneously with the Buddha, compared life, considered a source of endless suffering by the Buddhists, to a fish: alas, it has fishbones, but these can be discarded, and then we can enjoy the fish’s flesh. Similarly, life contains suffering, but this can be minimized and reasonably dealt with, and the rest can be a great source of joy. This outlook can be likened to Epicureanism.

Jainism is an ascetic tradition that upholds the “extremism” in ascetic practices which the Buddha as a moderate ended up rejecting. It has remained confined to India until the modern age, and to a few million adherents in the business class. The lay Jains chose this line of work because it does not entail any form of violence, the gravest sin in Jainism. This is a fully atheistic religion. It doesn’t believe in God (singular or plural) in any form. However, they do practice religion and worship in temples, but these are dedicated to human beings who have achieved the state of liberation.

Atheism: orthodox

On the other hand we have several philosophies deemed orthodox, which once were atheist in outlook. Later they disappeared or conformed to the rising wave of theism. The Vedic school of philosophy par excellence, the Mīmānsā, “hermeneutics”, focused on the interpretation of Vedic ritual. Though working in a context which was religious par excellence, it said that the gods invoked are but labels of components of the ritual, existing only by the mental effort of their worshippers. This school is regularly credited with being the first articulately atheist school in the world, certainly the first one which takes the human fact of religion into account but gives it a non-theistic explanation. After a high tide, it was eclipsed in the early second millennium.

The Sāmkhya (“enumeration”, viz. of the 25 substances which make up the cosmos) school ended up classified as “orthodox” but is in fact non-Vedic. The well-known philosopher Śaṅkara, really more of a Veda theologian than an autonomous thinker, criticized it for never referring to the Vedas. It must have been in existence for a long time, and Vedic literature also borrows from it. Well-known is the Sāṁkhya simile from the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (300 BCE?) that an unborn and three-coloured (black, red and white) woman waves goodbye to an unborn man who has had his pleasure with her but has had enough, and receives another unborn man who has his pleasure with her. The woman represents nature, wherein three qualities can be discerned, represented by the colours (more on these below). The men represent the different units of consciousness, or persons. Some persons have enjoyed nature long enough, lose their interest and seek liberation; other persons are still busy enjoying all that nature has to offer. The one nature and the many consciousness units form the two poles that make up the universe. The liberation of consciousness amounts to its separation from nature. Note that God plays no role whatsoever in this system. However, it lost its steam in the first millennium CE, and after a blip of revival in ca. 1400, it ceased being a living school.

Vaiśeṣika (“distinction-making”, “focused on particulars”) taught that the universe consists of a finite and unchangeable number of smallest particles, and these are eternal. The universe has never been created: either it is eternal or it has been created, but if so, it was created by an eternal uncreated being, which only shifts the burden of eternality to a purely supposed rather than an actual being. So we might as well assume the eternality of the universe. However, later this school united with the theistic Nyāya (“judgment”, logic) school and became theistic.

Uttara-Mīmāṁsā (“later hermeneutics”), better known as Vedānta (“final part of the Veda”), forms a deliberate continuation of the Upaniṣad-s (“confidential teaching”), the philosophical closing texts of the Veda-s. Unlike the Vedic hymns and the ancillary Brāhmaṇa-s (“priestly books”), concerned with ritual, the Upaniṣad-s deal with knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the Self (ātman), i.e. pure, unconditioned, impersonal consciousness. Their central doctrine is that the Self is fully the same as the Absolute (Brahman), like the drop is made of the same substance as the ocean. It follows that the unchanging and undying Absolute is nothing but consciousness. The different subschools of Vedānta will try to define the exact relationship between the Self and the Absolute. The best-known worldwide, and the most popular in the modern West, is Advaitā Vedānta (“non-dualistic Vedānta”), thought up by Śaṅkara in ca. 800 CE. This teaches the uncompromising unity of the Self and the Absolute. For Westerners tired of Christian dualism, this is welcomed as a relief. However, in real life, Śaṅkara also worshipped the gods, just as the Stoic philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius religiously observed his daily sacrifice routine after his philosophical meditations. Śaṅkara is venerated in India for his debating skills and for the institutions he founded, but his non-dualistic viewpoint has largely been forgotten. It is at any rate much less representative for Indian thought than his Western fans assume.

His simple and radical scheme was soon sidelined by the far more important dualistic (or nominally “qualified non-dualistic” and “difference-yet-no-difference”) schools of Vedānta. These schools, which elbowed out the remaining non-Vedānta viewpoints, effectively became the framework of the religious wave at the mass level, Bhakti (devotion). Among the gods of Hinduism, one was chosen, extolled and worshipped. In most Hindu temples, five gods are worshipped of whom one is central: Viṣṇu (“the all-pervader”), Śiva (“the benefactor”, actually an apotropaic euphemism for the storm-god Rudra, “the red/furious one”), Devī (“the goddess”), Gaṇeśa (“lord of groups”) and Sūrya (“the sun”). By contrast, Brahma (“increase”) as the personification of the Absolute is practically not worshipped. In devotional Hinduism, as theorized by the dualistic Vedānta philosophers, the situation is like in Christian mysticism: the supreme being is mostly conceived as a person and one can ascend to God but never unite with Him. One can contemplate Him but never be His equal.

This way, we have gotten modern Hinduism: a landscape studded with temples and idols, a shrine or separate room in the houses for devotional rituals (pūjā), and but very rarely an odd intellectual who stands aloof from the belief in a supernatural being. Atheism has been in the ascendant for some centuries, but that was two thousand years ago.

Sāṁkhya

Buddhism describes Sāṁkhya as its own source, founded by the sage Kapila who gave the Buddha’s wandering ancestors a domain where they could build the settlement Kapilavastu (“Kapila’s habitation”), in which the future Buddha was to grow up. Patañjali’s Yoga (“discipline, control”), now reckoned as a separate philosophy, was anciently (and rightly) considered an application-oriented subschool of Sāṁkhya. Like Buddhism, it vaguely recognizes the existence of the gods (unless our understanding of the Sanskrit words is anachronistic) but gives them no place whatsoever in its analysis of the human problem nor in its proposed way out. Only in the modern age have theistic Hindus magnified the religious element in it and renamed it as Seśvara Sāṁkhya, i.e. Sāṁkhya-with-God. Even then, the relative absence of God contrasts conspicuously with the really theistic systems.

The monistic Vedānta philosophy, which won the day in Hinduism and is espoused by most sects in its theistic form (Bhakti, “devotion”), criticizes Sāṁkhya for not basing itself on the Veda-s, i.e. for being a real philosophy rather than a scripture-quoting theology. However, Vedic texts refer to some typical concepts of Sāṁkhya, which has its sources much earlier. Its dualism of consciousness vs. nature (reminiscent of thinking vs. extension, res cogitans vs. res extensa) is in fact an elaboration of the common-sense view, contrasting with the mystical attractiveness of the heady Vedānta view. In the latter, everything is the Absolute, so all is one -- gee, that’s cosmic! In Sāṁkhya, by contrast, the irreducible separateness of the different “persons” or units of consciousness is taken for granted. Your memories make you unique and separate from me with my memories, we are distinct persons, and there is no reason to remedy this condition.

Had Nietzsche known it sufficiently, he could have approved of Sāṁkhya’s atheism. It is reminiscent of his beloved pre-Socratic philosophies. The great Sāṁkhya classic, the Sāṁkhya-Kārikā (2nd century?) does not even mention a supreme being. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (“aphorisms on control”), some concessions are made to believers, but Yoga is defined purely technically as the silencing of the mind, not as a “union with God”. The late Sāṁkhya-Sutra (14th century), operating in a religious landscape that had become completely theistic, argues elaborately against the existence of God, and in favour of the eternality of the universe. But perhaps its relative pessimism about the world’s inherent suffering, radicalized in Buddhism (“all is suffering”), can be reckoned as un-Nietzschean.

Karma: beyond good and evil

A very prominent doctrine in Indian thought is that of reincarnation and karma. In the Vedic hymns (pre-1000 BC), the word karma still had its etymological meaning "do, make", whence "action, ritual". Therefrom, it came to connote “action at a distance”, viz. between the ritual and its intended fruits, e.g. restoration of health, victory on the battlefield, a woman saying yes etc. Even the Mīmāṁsā philosophers, sceptical of the involvement of any divine persons in the ritual, believed in the magical “action at a distance” of the Vedic rituals.

In the Bhagavad-Gītā (200 BC?), the word karma-mārga, “the way of ritual action”, still has this meaning (and not “doing your duty”, “ethical living” “the yoga of action in the daily life”, as is often said since Swami Vivekananda gave it this meaning in ca. 1895): it refers to Vedic ritual. There, it contrast with jñāna-mārga, “the way of knowledge”, developed in the Upaniṣads after and in reaction against the emphasis on ritual action in the Vedic period; and with bhakti-mārga, “the way of devotion”, chiefly devotion to the deified hero Kṛṣṇa, the proper and innovative message of the book, hugely influential in popular Hinduism. The way of knowledge is chiefly concerned with meditation, as the path to knowledge of the Self, i.e. pure consciousness, the object of most philosophies and the goal of most Hindu monks. The way of devotion means the religious practice maintained by the vast majority of Hindus, viz. worship of the gods, mainly one’s own “chosen deity”.

Meanwhile, without letting it give a new meaning to the term karma, the Gītā introduces the notion of reincarnation. It attaches no moral sense to rebirth yet, just like the reincarnation beliefs attested elsewhere, e.g. among the Levantine Druze and many Amerindians, but affirms that dying is like undressing before going to sleep and getting dressed again tomorrow. It is part of Kṛṣṇa’s exhortation to the hesitant hero Arjuna, that it is alright to do battle: you need not be afraid to die, nor have scruples to kill, because if you die or if your enemy dies, it is only a temporary phase while moving on to a next life. No specific link, moral or otherwise, between this life and the next is posited here. It is the naked theory of reincarnation that we find here, without the moralistic interpretative apparatus which later Hinduism and Buddhism have attached to it.

We should be careful not to amalgamate this doctrine too easily with Nietzsche’s “eternal return”. The reason for this eternal return is that the number of possible causes is finite while time is infinite, so that the chain of causes effecting the present state of affairs will necessarily repeat itself. Reincarnation is distantly akin, it may stem from a similar intuition, but any non-superficial comparison will find them different.

Then, “action at a distance” is reinterpreted and applied to the successive incarnations. The moralistic version, popular among the masses east of the Indus, including the East-Asian countries where Buddhism has spread it, views the contents of the next life as a reward or punishment for one’s acts in a previous life. Good and evil get a very prominent place here. Unlike Immanuel Kant’s notion of doing the good for its own sake, and virtue being its own reward, good and evil acts here get the power to determine one’s apparent “fate” in the next life. A secular view of life posits no link between one’s fate and the moral quality of one’s acts: even a saint can get robbed or killed. Here, by contrast, morality controls the universe, which is inherently moral.

However, there exists a more subtle version of the karma doctrine. When we die, the motive force that spurs us on to return to this world in a new body is desire. Our deeds and experiences have shaped a pattern of non-satisfaction due to preference and aversion, and this leads to seeking new chances to satisfy these. Therefore, if the desire is quelled, and neutrality takes the place of preferences and aversion, there is no motive force anymore that drives you to a new birth. That is how desire leads to rebirth, while the cessation of desire leads to liberation or nirvāṇa (“blowing out”). But outside the circle of ascetics, this more subtle version of the karma doctrine is little known. Note that this version is “beyond good and evil”.

Few people realize (and many Hindus will be startled if not angry to hear us assert it) that the karma doctrine is inherently linked with atheism, even in its vulgar moralistic version. Because the world is deemed inherently just, with a certain type of deeds automatically leading to a certain type of experiences, there is no need for a Father in heaven to dispense justice. In history, the most atheistic schools, especially Jainism, have had the most radical and uncompromising conception of karma. You are deemed stuck with your own karmic record, you have to work it off yourself and bear all the consequences yourself for any karma you incur further. No other being, whether human or divine, can relieve you of even the smallest quantity of karma. By contrast, in theistic Hinduism, lip-service is paid to the notion of karma, but in fact it is very watered down. People pray to a divine being for the diminution of karma, somewhat like Catholics can buy indulgences to be freed from so many years of purgatory.

The parable of the three stages

A detail worth analyzing is how the age-old Sāṁkhya cosmological scheme of triguṇa, “three qualities”, authentically fits the famous parable of Camel-Lion-Child. Like we have a yin/yang bipolarity in Chinese thought, we have a tripolarity in Indian thought. Every society of gods or men was deemed to be divided in three parts, having to do with order, action and sustenance: (1) sattva, “beingness, truth, goodness”, the pole of calm, clarity and order, symbolized by the daylight, the white colour and the majestic heavens; (2) rajas, “turbulence”, the pole of dynamism and passion, symbolized by the twilight, the red colour and the stormy atmosphere; (3) tamas, “darkness”, the pole of inertia, materiality, quantity and sustenance, symbolized by the night, the dark colours and the all-bearing earth. (To complicate matters and take the equivocity of symbolism into account, the twilight with its moderate temperature and sacral mood can also count as sattva, the daytime with its heat can also count as rajas.)

In society, the three poles correspond to three social functions and the classes performing them: (1) order and legitimacy are the province of judges, poets, priests and of the king in his sacral role as embodiment of a nation’s sovereignty; (2) action is the province of administrators and soldiers, and of the king in his role as commander-in-chief; (3) sustenance is the province of the farmers, craftsmen and other producing classes, of healthcare providers and entertainers, and of all members of society in so far as they partake in the process of fertility and multiplication. The scheme corresponds as follows with the Puranic divine trinity (trimūrti): the creator Brahma corresponds to the dawn, or rajas; the sustainer and solar deity Viṣṇu to the daylight, or sattva; the leveller and moon-god Śiva to the night, tamas.

In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in the protagonist’s first sermon, he discusses the three transformations, the three phases of growth. Firstly, the human mind becomes a camel, slow and eager for heavy loads, obedient but strong, labouring and blindly following. This is evidently the pole tamas. Secondly, it becomes a lion, full of fury and passion, not obeying the “you should” commandment, but asserting his “I will” volition and his freedom. This is visibly the pole rajas. Finally, it becomes a child, light and innocent. This is the stage of transparency, of the third pole, sattva. This way, Nietzsche’s newfound simile actually corresponds to an age-old thought model, best articulated in Sāṁkhya.

Atheism in the Puranas: (Agni Purana to be precise--around 500AD roughly)

Each is alone. We are strangers to strangers. We are cut off from dearest and nearest, none knows the other, and the Self belongs to only to the Self. Man is born alone. Alone he lives. Alone he dies. Alone he tastes the fruits of his actions. His true company is he and his work. He comes from darkness, goes into darkness. His body changes. His spirit changes. Who is he? What belongs to him? Nothing. Nothing lasts. He has no teacher. But himself. He must go along the road to knowledge alone, to happiness alone, to inner peace alone. Only he is his constant friend. Only he is his constant enemy. From others nothing comes to him, nothing is owed to him. That is why he must honor himself. Revere himself. Assert himself. Each is alone.

Renounce living in others. Renounce needing others. Renounce everything he must, everything he has been told. Then know, and recreate. When he does not struggle, when he cares about nothing, everything belongs to him. Each is alone.

Morality is a means the weak use to manipulate the strong. The great is cruel, so he seems to some. (Compare that to "grausam" and Neitzsche's Geneology of Morals and Cruelty).

On atheism and Hindus... while there are many schools, one constant is that it does not force one school or other on anyone. Each is left to choose his own deity, or no deity; this path or that path; this way, or that way, or discover your own way. The implicit premise in such religious flexibility is Atheism, or at least respect for Agnosticism and Atheism.